When 22-year-old student Christian LeBlanc fed a basket of bananas to a group of elephants on the Thai island of Koh Phangan in 2015, one of them seized his GoPro camera by its mount, and when the self-timer triggered the shutter he got “the worlds first ever Elfie.”

“Elephants are incredibly intelligent and it definitely makes you wonder if it was a conscious action,” he wrote. So who gets the credit? For now, in the judgment of Wikimedia, “This file is in the public domain because, as the work of a non-human animal, it has no human author in whom copyright is vested.”

A brilliant device from the Japanese television variety show Kasou Taishou. Another:

Because he had to earn a living painting portraits, Thomas Gainsborough could not spend as much time sketching outdoors as he would have liked. So he arranged pieces of moss, rock, vegetables, and mirror into tabletop “landscapes” that he could paint at night by candlelight.

Joshua Reynolds recalled him collecting “broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of looking glass, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees, and water.” Another visitor wrote, “I … have more than once sat by him of an evening and seen him make models … for landscape scenery on a little old-fashioned folding oak table. … He would place cork or coal for his foregrounds; make middle grounds of sand and clay, bushes of moss and lichens, and set up distant woods of broccoli.”

Holst’s The Planets premiered in 1918, 12 years before Pluto was discovered.

So in 2000 Colin Matthews wrote an eighth movement, “Pluto, the Renewer,” to complete the cycle.

(I’m not sure of its status since 2006, when the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto a dwarf planet.)

“First I thought Troilus And Criseyde was the most boring poem in English. Then I thought Beowulf was. Then I thought Paradise Lost was. Now I know that The Faerie Queen is the dullest thing out. Blast it.”

It had been written by Philip Larkin, who had studied English there in the 1940s.

When as a child I laughed and wept,
Time crept.
When as a youth I waxed more bold,
Time strolled.
When I became a full grown man,
Time RAN.
When older still I daily grew,
Time FLEW.
Soon I shall find, in passing on,
Time gone.
O Christ! wilt Thou have saved me then?
Amen.

He called it “Time’s Paces.”

You shall hear how Lady Constance,
Tiring of her wounded husband
(Poor Sir Clifford, high war-hero,
Inconvenienced by shrapnel),
Found a gamekeeper called Mellors
Who would teach her in his lunch-hour
(And in language frank and fearless
Such as wives and servants blush at)
To admire the lower orders
While that blighted Bart, Sir Clifford
(Let us waste no pity on him,
For the man was paraplegic),
In his new electric wheelchair
Tried to drive it up a tunock —
Tried and tried, and couldn’t make it.

From a Spectator competition. Chatterley in Field & Stream. Hiawatha in condensed matter physics.

Winner of a clerihew contest sponsored by Games magazine in 1983:

Did Descartes
Depart
With the thought
“Therefore I’m not”?

• “U.S. Leadership Needed” (New York Times)
• “Trade, A Two-Way Street” (New York Times)
• “Beyond the News, Larger Issues” (New York Times)
• “Thoughts at Graduation Time” (New York Times)
• “Continue Manned Flight in Space” (New York Times)
• “Chill Falls on Warming Relations Between Australia and Indonesia” (New York Times)
• “University of Rochester Decides to Keep Name” (New York Times)
• “Dramatic Changes Fail to Materialize on Hill” (Washington Post)
• “Surprises Unlikely in Indiana” (Chicago Tribune)
• “CIA Analysis Sees Soviet Economy in Need of Changes” (San Diego Union)
• “Prevent Burglary by Locking House, Detectives Urge” (Boston Globe)
• “Methodists Oppose Use of Nuclear Arms” (New York Times)
• “Economist Dies” (Wisconsin State Journal)
• “Turbulent Days for Donald D. Engen” (New York Times)

The winner was found in the New York Times science section: “Debate Goes on Over the Nature of Reality.”

• An article about a boy sentenced for stealing a twopenny pie was indexed under “Atrocious Criminal.”
• An article about a floating chapel loosed from its moorings was indexed under “Disgraceful Act.”
• An article about a storm at Saône-et-Loire was indexed under “Fatal Storm.”
• An article about a spell of dry weather was indexed under “Present Dry Season.”
• An article about two women imprisoned for stealing a mare and for shooting at a man were indexed under “Rather uncommon for Females.”

Apparently Palmer had simply been compiling headlines without reading the articles. This accounts for entries such as “Extraordinary Escape of Boy at Erith Station, From a Bull Being on the Line” and “Extraordinary Marriage Adventure.” Thompson wrote, “One would expect to find this system adopted in a ‘table of contents,’ but surely it is out of place in an ‘index.'”

One wonderful exception, which Palmer apparently wrote himself:

“Death of Jane Thomas in her Mother’s Arms in Holborn at Joy in Seeing her parent at the Stage Door to Receive her.”